Supporting middle school students with content area academic language

Townsend, D. (2015). Who’s using the language? Supporting middle school students with content area language. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 58(5), 376-287.

Background

The author noted that students needed to be able to use academic language, but many students found academic language foreign. She thus proposed scaffolded literacy instruction to help them gain access to academic language and use it.

Aims

The study examined how teachers integrated academic language scaffolding into their content area lessons in the context of a professional development partnership with university researchers and whether their participation in the project had an effect on their students’ academic language.

Sample

The participants were eight middle school teachers, 304 Grades 7 and 8 students, and eight researchers. Three teachers taught mathematics, two taught science, one taught English as a second language, one taught English Language, and one taught social studies. The students were all from the same American middle school and were predominantly multilingual students whose first language was Spanish and who came from low-income families.

Method

All the teachers participated in entry interviews, exit surveys, and three professional development workshops focusing on scaffolded content area academic language instruction. During these workshops, they experienced strategies requiring them to use word- or sentence-level academic language before planning their lessons requiring students’ use of academic language. Four of their lessons were observed and video-recorded with either follow-up written reflections or reflection meetings. Artefacts were also collected from the observed lessons. The researchers catalogued and coded all the collected data to determine the types and amounts of academic language scaffolding in the observed lessons. They used the interview, survey and reflection data to explain the observed language practices. Pre- and post-tests were conducted on the students’ spelling of high-frequency general academic words and their morphological knowledge of general academic words.

Findings

The teachers used active practice strategies involving short activities such as quick-writes or pair-shares throughout their lessons, and longer activities that allowed their students to read, write, and discuss using the appropriate academic language. They also modified their instruction to include content-area morphology. The students’ gains in academic language were found to be greater for those who had two or more teachers who participated in the intervention compared to those who had only one participating teacher. The students could generate morphologically complex academic words more successfully.

Implications

The author suggested that teachers could plan activities allowing students to use academic language actively, such as quick-writes and pair-shares. Teachers could reflect on whether their students used academic language during the lessons.

Original article retrieved from EBSCOHost.